I'm looking to run a competitive 3v3 team, with a viable comp.  I would like to go for at least 2200 rating, but we can reset our goals once we get there and shoot higher if we like.  The problem is that my needs are pretty specific.

I'd like to run one of the following comps in 3v3, and a quality paladin is required in almost all of them.

PHDk (Holy Pally / Hunter / Death Knight)
African Turtle Cleave (prot warrior, or feral druid / Marksmanship hunter / Holy Pally)
Beast Cleave (Surv or BM hunter / Enh Shaman / Holy Pally)

I have talked to a Prot Warrior who is interested.  I'd love to run ATC, as it seems like the most fun and can be very competitive if played correctly.  PHDk would also be fun, but I need a really strong Death Knight to be able to pull it off successfully.  I already have an enhance shaman that I do a mini Beast Cleave 2v2 with, that I'm sure would be game to try a 3v3 Beast Cleave.

As you can see, the only missing pieces would be a skilled Holy Paladin and possibly a Death Knight.

If you can fill the roles I'm missing, please post here.

P.S.  If I can find a quality Death Knight, I would also be willing to pick up a resto shaman for an SHDk team.  I would prefer a paladin, but a shaman could provide some extra help with a heroism, Hex, etc.

Warlockery: A Primer on Playing a Purple Square (current 4.0.3)

The goal here is to compile several key sources of information about how to most successfully play a warlock in PVE. I'll try to remember to head back here and update things as Cataclysm progresses. First a few caveats: 1) I use ElitistJerks, MMOChamp, WorldofRaids, and so forth, as sources; if you're looking for an original source start looking in those places. 2) If you have a comment, you're welcome to make it. If you're just looking to prattle on about what you "feel" should be a better (fill in the blank: gem to use, spell rotation, stat priority, etc) I'd very much prefer you keep your unresearched opinion to yourself. IF, however, you've got some solid math and/or reasoning to show that I'm wrong PLEASE DO comment and let me know. 3) Each and every one of my comments is aimed at increasing Raid DPS. I understand that personal DPS is one of the most important components of Raid DPS; however, Raid DPS is ALWAYS the end goal of the warlock.

I've been asked to play Destruction in my 10-man (primarily to have a source of replenishment as well as some other buffs), however, I'll do my best to focus this guide on more general warlock guidance as there are some new things to consider in cata. 

Dark Intent

By now, you've become familiar with Dark Intent--the new warlock buff. For the uninitiated, here's what it does:

1. It applies a 3% haste buff to both the casting warlock and that warlock's target (cannot be self-cast). This does stack--that is, if there are 2 warlocks in raid, and they "trade" dark intents (like mages traded focus magic) they will indeed stack additively to a 6% haste buff. Don't do this. It's stupid. Very stupid. Why? See point 2.

2. Dark Intent also applies stacks of dark intent. Stacks are applied on your target when one of your periodic damage attacks is a critical strike. When the target of your dark intent crits with a periodic DoT (or HoT), they apply one stack of dark intent on you. Each stack of dark intent equates to 3% additional DoT damage or HoT healing up to a maximum of 3 stacks. The reason "trading" dark intent is a bad idea is that regardless of how many times you have the dark intent buff on you, one character can only gain a maximum of 9% increased DoT damage or HoT healing. By trading the buff (with one other warlock), you're essentially giving only 2 people 9% increased periodic damage or healing, while you could have 4 people with 9% increased periodic damage or healing.

Who do I cast dark intent on?

This post answers that question in some detail. In short, given that healers are doing much to conserve mana, they may not be throwing out HoTs like they did in Wrath. Their good play may actually make them a less desirable target for your DI. If you cast DI on a healer, it should probably be a resto druid or a raid healing holy priest.

One of the fun things about DI is that it allows for certain class synergies in raids. For instance an affliction warlock who DIs a shadow priest adds about 4.1k raid dps (in iLvL 372 gear). Meanwhile, the identical affliction warlock who DIs a boomkin gets about 3.4k extra raid dps. Here's the cool thing about that: If said affliction lock looked only at his or her own personal dps gain, he's likely to choose the boomkin--he gains more from buffing the boomkin, but the raid loses 500 dps.

Moral of the story: Do - read the above linked post and maximize your Dark Intent usage based on your specific raid's requirements. Don't - be a selfish fucktard who ends up costing your raid 500 dps because you want to squeeze out an extra 9 dps.

Fel Flame

We got green fire!!!! Ok, are you over it? You should be. How cruel is Blizzard to give us green fire in a spell we NEVER cast. MAYBE cast this when you're on the run. OR, if you've got some hella awesome haste buff from something that you want to keep on immolate or unstable affliction. Mostly, this doesn't get cast.

Raid Buffs

Food: You'll most likely be using Severed Sagefish Head (Deepsea Sagefish can be caught, relatively reliably, off the shore of Twilight Highlands--don't look for schools, just fly out to a wrecked boat or small island and cast off) although if you're short on hit you may also opt for Grilled Dragon, and finally, IF you're desperately trying to get to the 50% haste threshold to get another dot-tick you might opt for Basilisk Liverdog. Note, intellect is the best stat a warlock can get, I believe this is true regardless of what spec you play. As a general rule of thumb, your dps will go up more per point of intellect than anything else. It's going to be the safest choice to use +intellect food.

Flask: Flask of the Draconic Mind. Hopefully you knew that already.

Pot: Volcanic Potion. Again, a no-brainer.

Hit Rating

Things changed for Warlocks (and many other DPS casters) with Cataclysm. Hit no longer provides the most dps per point up to the hit cap. (This may be true-er for Destro than other specs, I can't say for sure...ok, I just went and double checked and now I can say for sure). For both pre-raid 346 and late T11 372, Intellect is more important than Hit. What this means is that there may be some circumstances when it's okay--and where you'll bring more damage to the raid--by NOT being hit capped. It's not like hit is something you'd need to avoid, it's just not something one needs to obsess about. This is a substantial change, as I understand it, from the way warlocks have been in any previous release (I didn't play in vanilla, but from what I read, this was not the case).

Presently, the spell hit cap is 1742. Because all gear a warlock would use has Int on it anyway, I've been gemming to hit the hit cap as well. However, I've been careful to use +int +hit gems rather than straight hit gems, in most cases.

Enchants

A post over at EJ (which can be found here) details what you should use, materials and money permitting. One note of disagreement I have is with the glove enchant he suggests. While I do believe that Jmickey (the author of the thread at EJ) is right about the optimal Cataclysm enchant, I think that according to scale values the old Wrath +28 spell power should provide the greatest dps increase unless one was using that particular haste enchant to bump them over a threshold.

Based on the latest simulationcraft outputs as of now, the most conservative haste : spell power scale value ratio is the 372 BiS geared affliction warlock. That ratio is 1.4442 : 2.5882. Meaning this: the glove enchant should, unless I'm missing something here, return 72.21 dps for the haste enchant and 72.46 dps for the spell power enchant. For all other gear levels and specs the difference is more pronounced in favor of the spell power enchant.

Haste Thresholding

I'll probably have to add more about this later too, but I've alluded to the idea of haste thresholds above. They're pretty important, so I'll mention them in some more depth here. Primarily, haste thresholds have the greatest effect on Destruction Warlocks because of the way that haste affects immolate and the way immolate affects the destro nuke, Conflagrate.

I'll make it easy. When you get enough haste, you get an extra tick of immolate. Without any haste on your gear, just through regular raid haste buffs, you'll probably get an extra tick of immolate. You'll only need 10% haste to achieve this. The next threshold is at 581 haste (30%). At 2639, you'll hit 50% haste and get 3 extra ticks of immolate. For present gear levels, a destro lock will probably end up being best off at 581 haste...that extra 2000 haste is just going to be a rough grind with current gear.

Crowd Control

Although you haven't used it for an expansion, it turns out, you do have some crowd control. You can fear humanoids and banish elementals and demons. Please don't fear things without glyphing into fear. You may only fear one target at a time. Same with banish.

With new warlock Banes and Curses being separate, it occurs to me that most fights will have an optimal warlock curse debuff depending on boss abilities.

I'm presuming that we'll never be using CoE as it should be brought by someone else in raid. Meaning the choice of curses is between Weakness (10% physical damage mitigation) and Tongues (30% casting time increase). This will serve as a placeholder and I'll throw out some conjecture based on Saedo's strat pages:

Magmaw: Curse of Tongues

Omnitron Defense System: Curse of Weakness

Chimaeron: Curse of Weakness

Atramedes: Curse of Weakness

Maloriak: Curse of Tongues

To be continued...

Introduction

The role of healing has changed dramatically in the Cataclym expansion. Gone are
the days of blindly spamming the most powerful healing or damage
absorbing spell with utter abandon to overhealing. Healers must be
sparing of every drop of mana even during five man trash.

This guide is designed to collaborate on methodologies to assist veteran and
new holy priest healers in this crazy-damage intensive world.

Initial Thoughts

Pros:

- Healers are required to critically think and practice true triage in order to endure basic boss encounters

- Healers get to use more spells than 1 or 2

- Cooldowns are used all the time instead of during sparce one-shot moments

- Glyphing is really important and situation requiring consistent swaping

- The party or raid must engage in stronger teamwork orientation to mitigate
optimal damage as well as peform, individually, at their best

- Mechanics that are designed to potentially wipe are actually hazards.
While failure to execute from 1 or 2 players once or twice is sometimes
excusable multiple infractions will cause a wipe

Cons:

- Always having to drink slows dungeon crawling to a true crawl

- Glyph swaping and drinks are expensive

- Mana conservation is at such a level that healers are often left with a sense of inadequacy to help their group

For a
general idea of where to start I suggest looking here:
http://elitistjerks.com/f77/t110245-cataclysm_holy_priest_compendium/

Talent Building

Instead of listing what you are to get I'll make this brief and suggest what you should avoid:

- Spirit of Redemption: Good healers should be last or next to last to die. By the time this is useful the group is preparing to wipe. The only ideal would be if the healer is too low on mana to continue and then martyrs themself to have free spell casts for 15 seconds (21 seconds glyphed). This requires the healer to be able to die and to do so near the group. While it's application seems feasible, it just seems like that additional talent point would be more often used elsewhere

- Blessed Resilience: This is a pvp talent

- Darkness (shadow): The amount of haste acquired should be sufficient from gear and gemming alone. Talent points should be focused in Veiled Shadows not just for the Shadow Fiend cooldown reduction but for the Fade cooldown reduction too

- Improoved Power Word: Shield (Discipline): You're a Holy Priest. Heal.

The one talent that priests should have is Lightwell. It's our highest hps and can be preset before a fight starts.

Healing Spells

Binding Heal - 28% base mana : 5387 base heal : 1.5 sec

Circle of Healing - 21% base mana : 2225 base heal (5 targets; 6 glyphed) : instant

Desperate Prayer - 0 cost : 6353 base heal (only used on self ; requires talent point) : instant

Divine Hymn - 36% base mana : 4773 base heal (12 heals) : channeled

Flash Heal - 28% base mana : 6726 base heal : 1.5 sec

Greater Heal - 27% base mana : 8968 base heal : 3 sec

Heal - 9% base mana : 3363 base heal : 3 sec

Holy Nova - 15% base mana : 2182 base heal (all friendly in 10 yrds) : instant

Holy Word: Sanctuary - 44% base mana : 389 base heal every 2 sec for 18 sec : instant

Holy Word: Serenity - 8% base mana : 2800 base heal (guess) : instant

Lightwell - 30% base mana : 3426 base heal (every 2 sec for 6 sec) : 0.5 sec

Prayer of Healing - 26% base mana : 4446 base heal (party) : 2.5 sec

Prayer of Mending - 18% base mana : 3537 base heal (bounces 5 times) : instant

Renew - 21% base mana : 1457 base heal (every 3 sec for 12 sec) : instant

Healing Mindset

Healing is difficult. Among watching our mana, watching health pools of everyone, keeping an eye on boss timers, looking out for debuffs, keeping track of chakra states, and keeping ourselves alive we have a lot to do.

Healing comes down to the following processes (not in any specific order):

1.) Should I heal?

2.) What spell should I use?

3.) Should I dispel?

4.) Leap of Faith?

5.) When should I use a mana regen cooldown?

Blizzard said they wanted healers to practice triage. For those who aren't familiar with that term triage is the combat medical tactic of deciding which injured soldier lives or dies on the battlefield due to limited medical supplies. Blizzard has succeeded in implementing the need but healers may not have gotten used to the concept.

Healers need to change their mindset. In Wrath of the Lich King we were used to mechanics that both forced and allowed us to maintain groups' health topped off at all times. This cannot work in Cataclysm. Healers don't have to let someone die, but they shouldn't be afraid to see dps hovering around 50% health either.

I use every spell in my book. Some more frequent than others but they all have an uptime. This is due to a need to be flexible in healing situations and Holy Priests glorious ability to switch roles in the middle of fights with chakra states.

How to Heal

Before any fight strategically place a Lightwell. Talk to the tank and figure out where he/she will be and place between tank and dps. The range has been increased and clicking the Lightwell no longer changes focus. Make sure people know how to use it. If a player is struck for 30% or more of their base HP, the effect goes away.

Initiate chakra and prepare to enter a state (Heal for Serenity; Prayer of Healing or Prayer of Mending for Sanctuary). Your chakra state will depend on the projected damage take: Serenity is typically single target and Sanctuary is group oriented.

Note on chakra states: While Sanctuary offers massive boosts to group healing it is the most mana expensive state. This is due simply to the fact that healing multiple 100,000+ HP targets is draining. Group healing is subject the massive overhealing especially when the damage is just pooring into the group, healers will tend to use an extra group heal or two when it isn't necessary especially approaching a transition from group to single target healing requirements.

To avoid this be aware of how damage is being inflicted. If it's a steady stream of damage, then you can apply an AOE heal that adds a HoT and watch for spikes on the tank (Prayer of Healing (glyphed), Prayer of Mending, Holy Word: Sanctuary, Renew). If the damage comes as a massive pulse, then use the non HoT'ing AOE (Prayer of Healing, Holy Nova, Circle of Healing).

Prefence to healing state is given to Serenity. This is due to the inexpensiveness to maintain and the addition of a cheap-effective instant cast spell Holy Word: Serenity. This state allows the Holy Priest to recycle the life of an applied Renew on target by casting any direct healing spell (Binding Heal, Heal, Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Holy Word: Serenity).

Holy Word: Serenity doesn't refresh Chakra state currently. This seems like a bug to fix.

The premise is to cast Renew and refresh it with direct spells instead of recasting Renew in addition to directly healing. This generates mana efficiency by removing the need to cast Renew every 12 seconds.

So after placing a Lightwell, I'll first cast Renew on the tank immediately after the first hit. Depending on the nature of the opening engagement I will either cast Heal to enter Serenity or I will cast a Flash Heal if the spike damage is severe. Here're my trees for opening engagements:

Light damage : Renew -> Heal -> Holy Word: Serenity -> Heal

Heavy damage : Renew -> Flash Heal -> Heal -> Holy Word: Serenity -> Heal

Massive damage : Flash Heal -> Flash Heal -> Greater Heal -> Renew -> Heal

On all opening fights it is important to watch the initial hit. I don't pre-HoT because it causes too much problems. Even if I were able to drink before the pull chances are the HoT would simply overheal and by the time the tank took the first noticible spike of damage it would be too late to enter Serenity to save the refresh.

Holy Priests in Serenity need to maintain that Chakra state for the duration of single target damage or at least until the spell Chakra is off CD. I stronly recommend keeping the state active instead of relying on recasting Chakra to reenter because the priest may need to change during encounters. To maintain Serenity the priest must cast Heal on anyone in the group. This is good for the following reasons:

1.) Heal is among the cheapest spells

2.) Heal refreshes Renew on target if in Serenity

3.) Heal can proc Surge of Light (free instant cast Flash Heal)

4.) Heal adds 4 sec to Chakra state if in Serenity

There will be spike damage. To deal with this I use Greater Heal which can be augmented by the talent Serendipity. This talent reduces the cost of Greater Heal or Prayer of Healing by 10% and reduces cast time by 20% (with two stacks). This comes from healing using Flash Heal or Binding Heal. Updated 12/13/2010

But Flash Heal is expensive. Won't maintaining Serendipity cause me to go oom?

Yes. Maintenance of Serendipity throughout a fight is a horrible idea. I see the use as either a proc due to Surge of Light, happenstance from needing to use Binding Heal, or knowing a massive spike is about to occur. Don't attempt to hold two stacks of Serendipity for the plausibility of needing a big-fast heal "at some point." Use it when it's available.

Speaking of Binding Heal it is a tremendously good spell. It's literally a Flash Heal that heals both the target and the healer. So in circumstances where the healer and another party member takes damage, use Binding Heal. Not only is it cheaper but faster to cast a single Binding Heal than two Flash Heals or four Heals or two Heals and two Renews.

AOE healing is difficult. Some people spec into damage reducing talents, gear isn't on the same level cross the board, gems, item enchant disparities, ability to move out of fire, do all players get hit or just two or three?, debuffs, tank damage in addition to group damage, all these things make it nearly impossible to not overheal.

Some damage is constantly happening and others spike; sometimes the spiking happens fast enough that if the healer waits to cast AOE the group will wipe.

Hey everyone!  I know it's been some time since I've /wowquit.  I've got to say, I do miss it and everyone quite much but being a dirt poor college student means I don't have money for it. 

So, I've decided to change my career path from going to law school (since I'm not getting a scholarship and can't afford to go that much into debt) and I'm actually trying to break into the film business.  I actually do have a really great connection (he's a lead editor for big movies) who said he'd help me get my foot in the door.  Anyway, I'm trying to come up with some short film ideas.  I already have a couple, and was wondering if anyone had any ideas for a 10 min or so short?

Thanks.

I miss yall. 

Having a bit of trouble with my computer. Works fine other then when i play wow. After about 10mins in game my monitor will go black the go to sleep w.o me hitting my sleep key and what not. After it goes to sleep i get no response and have to reboot my computer. Any ideas what may be going on?